Helping PE-backed mid-cap boards lead the delivery of change

A portfolio company leadership team already running hard, with BAU demanding full attention with the additional challenge to deliver the value creation plan running alongside. Each requiring a fundamentally different kind of experience. One, operational leadership: the capability that attracted PE backing in the first place. The other, change leadership, something all good operational leaders have developed through necessity, but most would recognise as secondary compared to their particular operational sweet spot.

Change leadership — diagnosis, design and delivery — is our core capability and we're set up purposefully so that we're tuned to the culture and dynamics of PE backed mid cap. We quickly grasp the situation, the challenge and the change delivery capacity and capability that's already available. We amplify what’s already good and we augment where there’s a real gap or a capacity constraint. We provide the change leadership layer that ties it together: with the depth of experience to form a clear view fast, the seniority to operate at board level, and the commitment to get hands-on where the work requires it. Strong enough, and principled enough, to say clearly what needs to be said. Sensitively and constructively.

We’re a cooperative of high-experience change leaders who’ve worked alongside each other on hard engagements over many years. One of us leads every engagement, and that lead has open access to the respective strengths of the others. We know each other’s shape and how to play to it. We don’t fight for intellectual turf, we make each other considerably more than the sum of the parts.

EMCS engages as a running partner to mid-cap boards providing the change leadership capabilities that, in a larger firm, the CIO and Change Director would bring to bear, but not as a typical interim would. What we bring is fractional access to multiple specialist capabilities, sized and blended to what the situation actually requires, with an accountable individual at the centre.

The change leadership judgment and direction sits separately from the delivery beneath it. That independence means we have no commercial interest in who delivers, only that it's done as efficiently as possible. That separation is what makes the independence real, and in our experience, it's what makes the difference.

We are selective about who we work with and what we take on. In part that’s a function of career stage, but more fundamentally, it’s how we’re built. The engagements we take on are ones where we genuinely believe we can make a difference, and with positive-energy, low-ego people we respect and expect to work well with. We’d walk away before we’d compromise on either. That applies to the portfolio companies we support and to the PE firms we choose to work alongside. When EMCS takes on an engagement, it’s because the conditions for doing genuinely good work are there. The problems matter to us. The people matter to us. Your challenge becomes ours. Personally.

We aren’t wired to cling on. We’re wired to tackle gnarly challenges, not tread water. We’ll be the ones pressing you to retake full ownership — before you feel the need to ask, because frankly anything else would embarrass us — and our experience is you’ll be the one asking us to stay a little longer. That tension, for us, is exactly right.

If something in what you’ve read feels relevant to a situation you’re navigating, let's discuss it as a straightforward conversation.

nigel@engagingmcs.com